Aggressive development of magnetic disk drive technology has opened up a performance gap between optical and magnetic storage data rates, seek times, rotational latencies, etc. Some optical drive technology has an order of magnitude difference in performance from its magnetic drive technology counterpart. For instance, CDROM data transfer rates are typically 9 megabits/second, while typical magnetic disk drive data transfer rates are more like 9 megabytes/second. Also, typical CDROM seek times are more like 0.2 seconds, while magnetic disk drive seek times are down to 8 milliseconds and dropping.
Today's multimedia PC's use CDROM as a major source of multimedia input. Interactive learning and interactive games can be achieved using this means. However, the data rate and the seek times of a CDROM conspire to cause the user to wait an inordinately long amount of time to access information from a different portion of the optical disk.